Comparing Color Words Comprehension in 36-71 Months Normal Preschool Persian Speaking Children

Word comprehension starts between 5 - 9 months after birth and before babies can produce any single word. Although in most domains of word learning, comprehension starts before production, for some categories such as color words, this order can be reversed. Children start producing color words without having any adult-like comprehension of these words.

The aims of the present study were to investigate the ability of Persian-speaking children to comprehend Berlin and Kay’s 11 basic color words plus 5 color terms that are frequent in Persian, to compare girls’ to boys’ scores, and to determine the easiest and most difficult color words to comprehend for children.

In this cross-sectional descriptive-analytic study, 36–71 month-old Persian-speaking children (N = 81, 43 girls and 38 boys), divided into 3 age groups with a one-year interval, were selected from 7 kindergartens by convenience sampling method. The color-word comprehension subtest of the picture receptive vocabulary test for Persian children was used. The data was statistically analyzed with a Kruskal-Wallis test, Mann-Whitney U-test, and Spearman rank-order correlation using SPSS software.

There was a significant difference between age groups to comprehend primary colors (P = 0.001), early-secondary colors (P = 0.002), and 5 common color words (P = 0.002). Girls’ scores were significantly higher than boys’ scores (P = 0.028). The correlation between age and color-word comprehension was positive (r = 0.423).

The findings of this study indicate that older children are more proficient in comprehension of color words compared to younger children, and girls are more proficient than boys. The two easiest and two most difficult color words for children to comprehend within the 3 age groups were “black” and “red” and “phosphoric-green” and “turquoise-blue,” respectively. There was a positive relation between age and color-word comprehension.